Dr. Anurag Singh explains how gut bacteria convert pomegranate compounds into urolithin A, a postbiotic that boosted worm lifespan by 45% and increased aerobic endurance in older rodents by 40-50% in six weeks. Most people lack the microbes needed to make this conversion, so direct supplementation bypasses that limitation.
You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. When we eat something, we know that our gut bacteria will transform it. And when I say eat something, we're talking about pharmaceutical drugs. It turns out many, many of the actions of pharmaceutical drugs are mediated by your gut bacteria. And we're figuring that out now. If you don't have the right gut bacteria, this drug doesn't work nearly as well or may not work at all. Yet some drugs work regardless of your gut bacteria. It all. It all depends. And then we get into all these natural compounds. I'm well known for saying, hey, maybe you should have more polyphenols in your diet because they do all sorts of good stuff. Polyphenols, colored compounds. If you guys are listening and you're new to the Upgrade Collective, new to the show, colored compounds that give red things their color and dark things their color, like black rice or black coffee, tea, chocolate, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, pomegranates, which is where we're going to go deep to today. Pomegranates make something called ellagic acid, and I'm one of the few people actually knows that. I don't have gut bacteria that convert ellagic acid into the active compound that gives pomegranates most of their good benefits. There's two reasons pomegranates work. One is ellagic acid. The Other one is PON1 enzyme. If it's fresh pomegranate juice, which is a detoxing enzyme, that's probably not as important as the other thing. So I used to have a pomegranate tree in my backyard. Didn't matter how much I ate. I could raise my blood sugar, but I couldn't raise my levels of beneficial mitochondrial compounds. So some people can, some people can't. The biohacker in me says, huh, what would happen if we could just take the compound that the bacteria make? Wouldn't that be amazing? And we have here, with Dr. Singh, one of the guys who's been studying this for seven years. And can you help me explain the discovery process for you saying, wait a minute, how did we know this was the one? Why urolithin A, which, by the way, is a terrible marketing name. You guys should have some. Oh, wait, you do. Timeline is the marketing name for it. But urolithin A, why that compound out of all the other stuff you could have looked at?
Sure. So. Well, there's a great story behind how that name came. Urolithins were actually discovered maybe back 40 years ago, back in 1980, they were discovered in beavers, in the, in, in the urine of beavers. So you know, the nerdy professor who discovered it said, well, I discovered in urine, so that's the Euro part. And, and he saw them as crystals. So that's the kind of urolith. Now beavers, we wonder why this discovery was made in beavers. And well, beavers eat a lot of tree bark of oak tree trees and, and these oak trees have a lot of polyphenols. Your favorite topic there, Dave. So typically elliotannins and so that's how this molecule was first discovered. Now, amazentis, fast forward 30 years. Amazentis has been studying legitannins and palm granite for almost 14 years now. We started with the theory that we could bring the, you know, the deep science approach to nutrition and natural product discovery. And so we started by deconstructing the pomegranate because, you know, the last 30 years there's been so many studies and health benefits associated with pomegranate. And out of the hundreds of compounds that we put, you start aging research typically in using worms and animal models. When we put the ellagitannins or ellagic acid as you were mentioning, on these worms, that didn't seem to be extending the lifespan of the worms. But when we said, okay, let's try these sort of byproducts of the metabolism of the gut microbiome called URL and we sprinkled that on the worms and they started living by about 45% longer. And that set the alarm bells ringing and was sort of the eureka moment. And from there we gave it to old rodents who were, you know, for. In just six weeks we started seeing about 40, 50% increase in aerobic endurance and increase in grip strength by about 10%. And the, the native polyphenol compounds were not doing it. So that sort of triggered the whole discovery around Eurolatans and how we focused and zoomed in and started moving it was really, you know, as you put it, this postbiotic, the process, you need two biases to really produce your lithin. You need to eat the right diet. So, you know, as you said, you can eat fruits and nuts and drink a glass of juice and then you need your gut microbiome. I can also share, I have tested myself and I don't have, I can drink 6 liters of pomegranate juice. My body will not produce this molecule. So we said, okay, this is how we're going to move forward with that. There's a need for supplementation.
